WRITERS & LOVERS by Lily King

Casey is a 31-year-old aspiring writer with crushing student loan debts that she acquired after blowing off a golf scholarship.  Barely keeping the creditors at bay, she waits tables at a posh Boston restaurant, where she meets Oscar, a charming, established author who is a dozen or so years her senior.  Oscar, whose wife died of cancer, is now the single parent of two ridiculously delightful boys.  Casey is grieving as well, as the death of her mother a year ago under weird circumstances seems to have fueled Casey’s panic attacks.  Meanwhile, Casey is also stringing Silas along.  He is an aspiring writer himself and falls more in her age bracket and peer group.  While she has an embarrassment of riches in the romance department, her already precarious financial situation takes a nosedive; she loses her job, learns that the space she rents is about to be sold, and discovers a possible cancerous lump.  This confluence of bad news would drive anyone to panic attacks, and writing is the balm that soothes her.  Plus, she eventually has to choose between the two men in her life.  She and Oscar’s lively and witty banter, not to mention his adorable sons, made me root for him, but she lusts after Silas in a completely different way, and he seems almost as broken as she is.  Bottom line:  I loved everything about this novel—the characters, the writing, and the storyline, which starts to fizzle near the end but then bursts into flower.  I did not expect that this book could top Euphoria, but this book has more heart and a more endearing cast.

THE PLEASING HOUR by Lily King

Nineteen-year-old Rosie, an American, has been hired as an au pair by a French couple, Marc and Nicole.  We learn early in the novel that she has given her infant daughter to her sister, but the details do not surface until much later.  We also know that her tenure with Marc and Nicole is relatively short-lived, as the timeline bounces between Rosie’s time with them and her later role as caretaker of Lucie, an elderly woman who knew Nicole as a child.  The two mysteries—that of Rosie’s baby and that of her departure from Marc and Nicole’s household—unfold in a dreamy manner, as we learn not just of Rosie’s background but of Nicole’s as well.  Both women’s histories are a little sketchy, however, and their complex personalities are most vivid during the pages in which they live together but never wholly warm up to one another.  Marc is also a very central character, although we learn almost nothing about his past.  That omission is obviously intentional, as we are left to draw our own conclusions about his real character.  Is he a man of integrity and substance, or is he not what he seems?  Rosie’s mistakes in life are plain to see, as both of the novel’s mysteries revolve around unfortunate decisions on her part.  Marc, however, is an enigma, as is the title.

PEOPLE PERSON by Candice Carty-Williams

If there’s one thing I like less in a book than bad writing, it’s a silly plot.  This book reminds me of Fredrik Backman’s Anxious People, and maybe it’s no coincidence that both have the word “people” in the title.  Here we have five half-siblings (same father, four different mothers) trying to dispose of a body that wasn’t really dead.  After this wacky incident, the story improves somewhat but not enough.  Dimple (a ridiculous name in a ridiculous plot) is the half-sibling whose ex-boyfriend Kyron slips and cracks his head open after he tries to strangle Dimple.  She scratches his face in an effort to slip out of his grasp and fears that those scratches will mark her as a murderer.  She then enlists the assistance of her four half-siblings, whom she has met only once, and they all reach the unlikely agreement that they should wrap Kyron in a tarp and bury him at a construction site.  After Kyron comes back to life, he attempts to blackmail Dimple, not knowing that she had four accomplices.  I get that this is supposed to be a feel-good story about family members coming together, but I would have liked a less ludicrous crisis as a catalyst to their bonding.  Plus, Dimple’s role as a social media influencer just makes her that much more of a caricature rather than a robust character.  Thank you to Book Club Favorites at Simon & Schuster for the free copy for review.

A SLOW FIRE BURNING by Paula Hawkins

Someone has slashed Daniel Sutherland’s throat.  Miriam, who lives in the houseboat next to his, discovers the body.  As it turns out, Daniel was not a nice guy, and several people may have wished him dead.  The police suspect Laura, as she was seen, covered in blood, leaving Daniel’s place the morning of his murder.  However, Daniel’s family members raise our suspicions as well.  His Aunt Carla and her ex-husband, Theo, lost their 3-year-old son fifteen years ago while Carla’s alcoholic sister, Angela, was babysitting.  The toddler fell to his death from Angela’s balcony while Daniel was still a child, and forgiveness has been hard to come by.  Angela preceded Daniel in death by just a few weeks, presumably as a result of a fall, so that we can eliminate her as a suspect.  Miriam’s best friend Lorraine was brutally murdered when the two girls were abducted as teenagers, and Laura has issues with anger management, due to a brain injury she suffered as a child.  In the middle of all these deaths and traumatic injuries is Irene, who befriends Laura, and Laura can definitely use a friend.  I liked this novel so much better than The Girl on the Train.  The plot is easy to follow, and most of the characters who are not dead have some redeeming qualities.  All of the women, except poor Angela, are pretty feisty.  Laura’s occasional violent outbursts mostly seem warranted as self-defense, while Miriam lives with survivor’s guilt, wondering if she should have made an effort to save Lorraine.  Irene almost goes too far in trying to solve the various mysteries at hand on her own.  Confrontation with possible murderers is never a good idea, but Irene uses her reputation as a silly old woman to good effect.

A TOWN CALLED SOLACE by Mary Lawson

Three main characters inhabit this novel—Clara, Liam, and Elizabeth, each of whom headlines the chapters.  Clara is eight years old, and her 16-year-old sister Rose has disappeared after one of many arguments with her mother.  Clara spends her time in a vigil by the window, awaiting Rose’s return, and taking care of her nextdoor neighbor’s cat, Moses.  That neighbor, Elizabeth, is now deceased, and Liam Kane, her heir, has moved into Elizabeth’s house.  His presence is puzzling to Clara, since her parents have chosen not to burden her with the news of Elizabeth’s death.  This novel makes a good case for not sheltering children from this kind of news, because not only does their secrecy erode Clara’s trust in her parents, but she initially mistakes Liam for a burglar.  Liam is not, in fact, Elizabeth’s son, but Elizabeth became very attached to him after her five miscarriages when he desperately needed parental love.  He was a neighbor’s son whose mother focused all of her energy on two sets of twin girls and found Liam to be an annoying and difficult burden.  Elizabeth was more than happy to take up the slack and look after Liam as frequently as his mother would allow.  A catastrophic mistake on Elizabeth’s part ended her relationship with Liam and his family, but she resumes contact with him after he is an adult.  He is now going through a divorce, has quit his accounting job, and has moved into Elizabeth’s house.  This novel bears some resemblance to Anne Tyler’s books in that it takes place in a small town with no real villains.  However, I found this book to be much more engaging, particularly with the intrigue and anguish surrounding the missing Rose.  My favorite character, however, is not one of the main three but rather Moses, the elusive cat.  I particularly love this sentence in the book, from page 188:

“She [Clara] fed Moses and then sat on the floor and watched him turn himself into triangles and squares and circles inside boxes until Mr. Kane stuck the key in the lock, whereupon Moses turned himself into a cat again and skedaddled.”

A CHILDREN'S BIBLE by Lydia Millet

A group of families are vacationing together in a very large waterfront house.  The kids, completely unsupervised except by one another, are the main characters, with the heavy-drinking parents in the background.  In fact, the parents are basically a collective entity, and the kids are playing a guessing game as to who belongs to whom; no one really wants to claim their own parents.  This book initially called Lord of the Flies to mind, but the kids are a little older, much more compatible, and basically seem better off without the adults’ interference.  When a huge storm befalls them, flooding the property and knocking out power, the kids have the good sense to head for a farm, where they have an ample supply of just about everything.  Then a pregnant mother shows up, followed by a band of violent outlaws, and things start to deteriorate rapidly.  Up until this point, the novel has been pretty lighthearted, but the arrival of the villains isn’t the only bad news.  The survival of the planet is at stake here.  The teenaged narrator, Evie, finds that her 9-year-old brother, Jack, has acquired a child’s version of the Bible and has captured an assortment of wild animals, like Noah but without the pairings, in an effort to save them from destruction.  This book may be an allegory of sorts, but Jack is astute enough to see the Bible as one as well.  He equates God with nature and Jesus with science, and his reasoning for doing so is very clever.  There are lots of other Bible story parallels, but the backbone of the novel is not an allegory.  The kids blame their parents’ generation for not being good custodians of our planet and rightfully so.  This novel can be seen as a call to action.  Ignoring the problem will not make it go away.

WHAT ARE YOU GOING THROUGH by Sigrid Nunez

Like her novel The Friend, this Sigrid Nunez novel addresses the death of, yes, a friend.  This time the death is planned but has not happened yet.  The narrator agrees to stay with her terminally-ill friend in the final days before the friend takes a euthanasia pill.  This book takes not only a very thoughtful look at the death of a person, but one character, who turns out to be the narrator’s “ex,” crusades to warn that the death of our planet is not only imminent but unavoidable—so much so that he laments the upcoming birth of his third grandchild.  Despite this maudlin subject matter, the narrator regales us with such funny reflections and remembrances that we forget to be sad.  There are so many great stories scattered throughout this novel, including one ostensibly about the cat on the cover and one about an elderly woman who tries to reform the scammers who constantly call her.  Although the narrator’s ex paints a gloom-and-doom portrait of humanity as being too stupid to save their own planet, the narrator reminds us that empathy and compassion still exist and that being there for someone can be fulfilling yet all-consuming.  Ultimately, the narrator’s anxiety moves away from the loss of her friend and on to the aftermath, in which she is expected to lie about her complicity in her friend’s euthanasia plan.  At one point the narrator notes that even a sad movie can be uplifting if the story is told in a beautiful way.  That same observation applies to this novel.